Pupil Premium

What is Pupil Premium?

The Pupil Premium is additional funding for publicly funded schools in England to raise the attainment of disadvantaged pupils and close the gap between them and their peers. This funding is aimed at addressing the current underlying inequalities that exist between children from disadvantaged backgrounds and their more affluent peers.

This funding is allocated to schools on the basis of the number of pupils who have been eligible for Free School Meals at any point over the last six years; children who have been “looked after” for more than six months, children who have left local authority care or children of service personnel.

The DFE has given us the freedom to use the Pupil Premium as we see fit, based on the knowledge of our pupils’ needs.

Nature of Support

At Park Road, we continued to use the additional funding to support a variety of strategies to best meet the needs of each individual child for whom the grant funding was allocated, including:

  • High quality, inclusive teaching.
  • Precision teaching by the class teacher.
  • Pupils taught in groups with other pupils who are working at a similar level.
  • Focused support from skilled teaching assistants, both in class and in small groups.
  • Individual tuition, by the class teacher or another experienced teacher.
  • Intervention strategy support from teaching assistants (for example, Literacy Support Programme, Reading programmes or one to one focused tuition).
  • Personalised support (including pastoral support) for individual pupils, to meet their needs.
  • Supporting parents to fund clubs and trips.

All interventions are highly targeted over a period of time, according to need.

Monitoring Impact of Pupil Premium Support

Mrs Walmsley (Headteacher) and Mrs Chadwick (Deputy Head with responsibility for Pupil Premium) have overall responsibility for the attainment and progress of Pupil Premium children although ensuring the progress of eligible pupils and evidencing this is a whole-school priority.

Children’s progress and attainment is tracked and monitored carefully to ensure they achieve their full potential. Regular monitoring and evaluation is key to ensuring the effectiveness of expenditure.

Targets for pupils are set in maths, reading and writing and we know where we expect each child to be, by the end of the year.

Monitoring is a joint responsibility of the class teacher and Senior Leaders and regular assessment data is analysed and acted upon. The DFE also analyse our school data and compare our results to national data.

Through our termly Governing Body meeting we report clearly on data for Pupil Premium and a transparent expenditure line is maintained in our financial monitoring so governors can link value for money with impact.

Pupil Premium Funding

For the academic year 2020-2021, we received £35,544  in Pupil Premium funding. A further £4690 of which is held by the Virtual Headteacher for Looked After Children.

For the academic year 2021-2022, we received £28,485  in Pupil Premium funding. A further £4690 of which is held by the Virtual Headteacher for Looked After Children.

Impact of Pupil Premium Funding

We are delighted that pupils entitled to pupil premium continue to achieve highly, We are proud to have helped these children (and of course all our pupils) to make such good progress in their key skills and are confident that their firm foundations will help them to continue to make strong progress throughout their time at our school and into their secondary school years.